Three Record Stores In Three Weeks

After leaving the Bull Moose record store in downtown Portsmouth, N.H., a few weeks ago, one of my friends turned and said, Does anyone feel old after being in there? I felt old because of the whiny nth-generation emo they were playing inside, but she had that reaction after seeing so many CDs on display in one place. Of the five of us, only I still shop at record stores with any regularity -- and my wife to a lesser degree because I drag her there.

In my inbox today, as part of Newbury Comics' weekly promotions, its co-founder divulged the company is in substantial trouble and adopting a "hybrid model" -- selling clothes and other accessories in addition to music and movies -- in order to survive because people don't buy CDs or DVDs anymore to make such stores viable financially. Yet I still love walking in them, and find it hard to imagine a city being great without one. They're such an enjoyable place to quickly lose 30 minutes and realize they're are so many well-written songs to swoon over. Of course, this puts me in the small minority. Doesn't anyone like holding anything in their hands anymore?

The week after visiting Bull Moose, I went to Pure Pop Records in downtown Burlington. The week after that, I was in Other Music, the restorative pilgrimage that every music fan should make each year. Everything about it says, Yes, this is cool. When my wife bought a used Buffy Sainte Marie record as birthday present for a friend, the cashier nodded in approval and quietly said to himself, Oh, man, nice! I couldn't think of any greater confirmation of one's taste and coolness than that. I felt truly honored to be standing next to her at the time.

At the stores, from best purchase to worst, I bought:

1. Widowspeak -- "s/t"

2. Veronica Falls -- "s/t"

3. Wild Flag -- "s/t"

4. Twin Sister - "In Heaven"

5. The Jayhawks - "Tomorrow the Green Grass"

6. Stephen Merritt - "Obscurities"

Above are photos I took in Other Music and Pure Pop Records.

Metro Regions In Reverse

For all the hand-wringing in the Republican Party (and elsewhere) about whether the U.S. has become Europe, the closest resemblance comes in one characteristic that certainly isn't being discussed in the presidential primary: American suburbs are fast growing poorer. European ones have long been this way, as city centers throughout the continent have long been home to the wealthy for several reasons -- postwar flight never happened on the same scale, public transit is much more extensive, and historic preservation, a key to these cities' identities and tourism, limits real estate development and keeps property values high. Low-income communities, particularly immigrant ones, live on the peripheries, where large-scale public housing can be built, most infamously in metro Paris, where the riots of several years ago produced lots of soul searching and questions about now-President Sarkozy's tolerance.

Now, the Brookings Institution reports that the U.S. suburban poverty rate grew by 53 percent during the last decade and 55 percent of metropolitan areas' poor people live in the suburbs. This flip between urban and suburban poverty isn't generally surprising because coastal cities have seen large influxes of the well-educated and well-compensated; young professionals stay and older families return. Nonetheless, its rate is quite dramatic, which affects nearly every aspect of urbanism, including the property tax base, the school system, access to transit, the delivery of social services over dispersed settlement patterns, the increased popularity of dense development, and the question of what to do with unpopular subdivisions. (If managing vacant land in Detroit is hard, imagine how much harder it is the outer reaches of metro Northern California.) Spatially, there are a popular wealthy core and a popular wealthy outer ring, but the inner ring is at risk of being skipped.

I work in one of these inner-ring suburbs. And as disappointing as it is to hear about rapid growth in poverty anywhere, I find this city to be wonderfully full of possibilities, even if the large majority of its residents are in the working class, if not the working poor. Perhaps this is because this city has always been an immigrant hub and looked like Boston's neighborhoods (even if it's not legally part of Boston) since well before urban living became popular again, so the city's leaders know how to run it. Whatever the reason, every downtown storefront is occupied, the streets are active, new real estate development happens in pockets, and life feels alive.

It doesn't always look very elegant and there's enough not to like there, too (crime, lower-quality schools, the problems that come with being a tougher neighborhood), but overall, it's very instructive about how to harness a working-class community and turn it into a vibrant place. When suburbs change from upper middle-class enclaves to the welcoming port for immigrants, the policy and urban planning that happen in them have to adjust so the city recognizes and maximizes the potential value. The line is fine between improving a low-income community so that it's a high-quality place that everyone deserves and making it such an attractive place that only the wealthy can afford it (again). But such places serve a very important role in a regional economy and ecosystem and their worth deserves to be trumpeted.

Thanks to Spoon for inspiring this post's title.

And He's Staring At Me Like It's 2001

The DJ at the Paradise last Friday sure knew his crowd. He played Ted Leo, Sonic Youth and Britpop covered in muddied guitars -- you know all those songs you searched for when you bought music on CDs. People in the audience looked like self-assured professionals, not college students, with nice, if not elegant, clothes and a little paunch. I was even below the average age of the crowd! We were the ones searching those CD racks! With Eleanor Friedberger, who's most certainly a veteran now, on stage, followed by Wild Flag, a supergroup of former members of Sleater Kinney, Helium and the Minders, it felt like 2002 all over again, maybe even 1998.

The crowd clearly wanted Wild Flag's set to be a triumph, a confirmation of our youth perhaps, and it sure felt that way. Mary Timony didn't look particularly well, which probably wasn't surprising for someone who's made several solo albums influenced by medieval English psychedelia; Janet Weiss and Rebecca Cole looked particularly like moms; and Carrie Brownstein still looked like she could pull off anything you dared her to try. Yet the show worked because they all played so ferociously, vitally and expertly. At this stage in their lives, they have no reason to worry about their place in indie rock, so they produced a magnificent combination of raucous energy, confidence and precision. Each member kept the others from diving too deeply into the outer reaches of their musical digressions, which is exactly what you want in a band -- a unit that keeps drawing everyone back to the cohesive center.

Wild Flag's brilliance prompted me to think this week about my all-time favorite shows and last Friday's combination of music, crowd and overall atmosphere make it one of the top-five that I've seen. The others in this group, in no particular order, are:

* The Trail of Dead, Bowery Ballroom, March 2002: They were touring behind "Source Tags and Codes," one of the last decade's best records, and were still in their dangerous youth. The show ended with the crowd throwing beer and prescription-drug bottles on stage (the band had taunted everyone into doing so) and a monitor falling on the bassist as he writhed against it. And then the Bowery cut the sound and opened the house lights. Oh, and mid-set, Conrad Keely nearly killed Jason Reece when he flung his guitar at the drums.

* Pavement, Agganis Arena, September 2010: Aw, c'mon. No, you c'mon.

* Do Make Say Think, Middle East Downstairs, September 2007: One of the more revelatory artistic experiences I've ever had, with one beautifully structured song after another.

* Radiohead, Liberty State Park, August 2001: I remember it was a beautiful night and the New York skyline, on one of the last times it had the World Trade Center, was wonderful.

Above are two blurry photos from Wild Flag's and Friedberger's performances. Thanks for Friedberger for this post's title; it's a lyric in her solo record's first song.

Farewell, Terry Francona

Terry Francona's value as the Red Sox manager is well encapsulated in his endorsement of Bigelow Green Tea. That a professional sports figure would endorse tea requires confidence -- it's not exactly the most masculine product to profess to love. But it's also inherently soothing and reflective of Francona's calm personality and influence.

In the early 21st century, when nearly all players are financially secure the moment they sign their first free-agent contract and thus free to do as they please, a manager's greatest talent is shepherding the clubhouse, not any particular in-game strategy or decision. Francona was a very good tactician, though not renowned for it. He was better known for trusting his leading players, even when they were in deep slumps -- which usually worked, particularly for Dustin Pedroia early in his career and David Ortiz late in his -- because he and the Red Sox management understand that players' revert to their typical performance. And he was best known for preserving a calm atmosphere around the team, which is a fantastic accomplishment considering the fan- and media-created hysteria that surrounds the Sox daily. The way he deflected every question rationally and modestly was admirable and kept the team humming.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the Sox have descended into a foggy panic since Francona resigned at the end of a hugely disappointing to the end of the season. The franchise insinuated he had a prescription-drug problem, three starting pitchers spent games during the season eating chicken and drinking beer in the clubhouse and John Henry, the team's owner, did an impromptu 60-minute interview with one of the sports talk stations because he was so mad about what they were saying on the air. Even the beat reporters are squabbling with each other! Tedium, apparently, knows no depths. Without Francona -- and now Theo Epstein, who's about to leave as general manager while still only 37 years old, and also had a pleasingly rational and successful approach to the game -- there's no stabilizing force.

The Sox collapsed and missed the playoffs because their pitching collapsed. First, they had too many injuries. Then, no one performed up to their means, which partly comes from poor conditioning brought on by beer and fried chicken, but is also a matter of personal focus and execution that can be tough to pinpoint. It resembled the end of the Mets' 2007 season, when no one could be trusted, and Francona likely knew it. For four weeks (and two more at the season's start), the Sox were awful, but for the remaining four-plus months, they were baseball's best team and only missed the playoffs by one game. Their roster is actually in adequate shape heading into next year.

However, no one, particularly the press, believes this, so it's probably best that Francona left, as sad as it is to say. What I remember from the 2008 Mets, after that epic collapse the previous year (which I contend is more historic than the Sox's because the Mets wasted a lead that was only two games smaller in 10 fewer games), was nothing happened without the specter of the previous year hanging over it. Any time they struggled, everyone assumed Willie Randolph would be fired as manager -- and then he finally was at 4:15 a.m. EST on a weekday in June. Now, no one on the Sox can open their mouths without creating huge news because everyone is obsessed. The same situation will persist into spring training next year, until the team starts playing and winning games again, and it would've remained even longer if Francona stayed because any miniscule hint of trouble would've revived all of this fall's hysteria. Without him, there's a clean slate but not a mug of Bigelow green tea, steam rising, or careful decisions being made.

Oh, Boy

In what might me this blog's most heretical moment, I confess to liking Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, "Freedom," at best mildly. He still writes with immense talent, as he did in "The Corrections" -- the territory that individual sentences cover, in one of the sharpest tones around, is remarkable. He sculpts the plot well, too. But the zest is missing from this one. Where "The Corrections" perfectly captured the late 20th century through the story of one family, "Freedom" bogs down in the tale of one family, as the early 21st century happens around it. For example, the trip through Argentina and Paraguay for ancient truck parts was fun, but it wasn't as vital as the previous trip to Lithuania for a fake start-up company. Before, the characters were meant to be prototypes or windows of the era, but here, they're meant to be real people and they don't work.

There were two minor points I found to be spot on: First, the observation through the character Patty that flip-flops are a sign of contemporary indifference -- people my age don't care enough to wear shoes often and flaunt their casual thwacking in front of older generations. Second, in the scene at the Bright Eyes concert, the observation that people my age are too accepting. No opinion or personality is dismissed. The anger of the youth movements in the '60s and '70s is gone. Opinions aren't defined in opposition to others, but in agreement.

Even with good smaller points, I thought the book, overall, was too trying. Some outlandish, unlikely plot developments happen to the central family, the Berglunds. Yet I thought the main argument was that the Berglunds were no different than the very large majority of any well-educated contemporary family of working professionals -- and they're all surrounded by crushing depression and deeply unhappy, dysfunctional relationships. I think Franzen was trying to say, Every professional in the Boston-to-D.C. corridor looks successful and will gladly try to convince you of how exciting modern life is, but underneath a thin veneer, everyone is beyond screwed up, so let's acknowledge this and explore how we're all incomplete people.

This might be true. My friend, who loved the book so much that he began it again the moment he finished it, says that complaining that "Freedom" is depressing ignores what happens in the world around us. But to experience these emotions for 558 pages is a test of wills. Reading the book made me think I behave like these characters, too, and that I have great fallacies I don't acknowledge readily enough (this also might be true), which made me depressed each time I opened the book. I suppose these days I try to think more optimistically. Surprisingly enough, I liked when some of the characters had happy resolutions to their predicaments.

We'll Come Back For Indian Summer

The Times' editorial page, like me, has always had a sentimentalist streak when it comes to the rhythms of the seasons. Back in August, it complained that this year's didn't seem like previous ones -- too much traffic, too hectic a pace and not enough people fleeing the city to relax and tune out the office. Last week, the writers spun this gem about fall 2011. Editorial pages aren't meant to be so lyrical:

"There is no single way to measure the coming of autumn. Gardeners wait for the first hard frost, the one the blackens the basil and pulps the tomatoes still on the vine. For some, it's the smell of wood smoke or the sight of leaves flaming out one tree species at a time. In New York City, there are different measures. Fall begins when street fashion slips into thermal chaos -- down jackets, shawls, bermudas and flip-flops all on the same block. Fall begins, as it did this week, when the residual heat in the subway station feels strangely welcome.

"The approach to autumn has been murkier than usual this year -- a long, damp slog toward October, days of rain all across the Northeast. We can hope, after the first hard frost, for a week or so of Indian summer. But there is really no proper name for the slice of the season we've had so far. This fall has been made of moments from late May, a few gray days from early June, some Sundays that April discarded, and a week or so that seems to have orphaned entirely, with no month to call home.

"It will come, we hope -- the sky a Venetian blue, the days as crisp as a just-ripe, old-fashioned apple, an Ashmead's Kernel or a Calvill Blanc. That is the autumn we're waiting for -- not a prognostication of winter or a postponement of summer, but actual autumn, a season we hope will last as long as it can. It is a season of gnat-killing nights and afternoons when the sun's heat is becoming elusive. It is frost on the grass and your visible breath rising in the air."

Well, that Indian summer came last weekend in New York and it was much warmer than the Times' writer would've liked but glorious nonetheless. He or she clearly doesn't live in Boston, where any unexpected warmth and soaking sunshine is welcome. Even if it was a postponement of summer, it was wonderful to chase it down. Thanks to Luna, via Beat Happening, for the post's title.

The Last Song On The Bon Iver Record Might Be The Most Egotistical Ever

Dude, have you heard the last song on the new Bon Iver record? That it sounds like "Colors of the Wind" -- you know the lead single from Disney's "Pocohantas," sung by Vanessa Williams -- wouldn't be such a bad thing if the rest of the album didn't sound like Sting circa 1992 or Phil Collins circa 1986. With the ultra-processed setting on the synthesizer and the heavy Auto-Tune on the vocals -- um, isn't this supposed to be indie rock?

"Bon Iver" is, surprisingly, a bro record. There are thick emotions throughout it, but they're all somewhat amorphous, swallowed by the unintelligible lyrics, hefty chords and dramatic countermelodies in the orchestration and vocals. In the end, there are well-composed, cinematic scenes, but they leave the feeling of a sweaty hug after a tough party -- people feel sad and they know this moment is important yet they're not exactly sure why. Considering Justin Vernon made his reputation on the poignancy and mythology of Bon Iver's first album, recorded in the dead of winter in Wisconsin's woods, brooding over a woman and much more, I thought this album would have more content below the surface.

By the time that last song, "Beth/Rest," kicks in, it's almost as though Vernon dares you to like it. The song isn't a gigantic wink at the audience, either. Vernon has said before how much he likes Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby, for example, and he's always presented himself as an earnest guy (the latter of which is admirable). He executed one of the past five years' most beloved records, so why not try to sneak a synthesized 1980s adult top-40 pop song past you, too?

There is something compelling about the song. My friend says it's a great closer because it provides a refreshing sense of resolution to the album, and I somewhat agree. Vernon cares about the whole record, which is a pleasing throwback in 2011. "Bon Iver" makes the most sense when you listen to all of it and take the time to appreciate each song's structure and growth. In this context, "Beth/Rest" is a part of a little world Vernon constructed -- the final resting point. Nonetheless, the song takes the production values and careful constructions that are the record's strengths and and heads to murky, unknown territory. The sincere kitsch, introduced by that keyboard hook, is a step too far for me, and suggests Vernon thinks he can get away with anything and still make it meaningful because he's Bon Iver. Not necessarily so.

Decide for yourself: above is a relatively good video of Bon Iver playing the song live.